OCTAPUS

Skyrocketing capacity demands and emerging 5G and industrial internet URLLC applications currently pose a new strict latency-oriented framework calling urgently for new radical architectural changes at the key aggregation infrastructure being in local proximity to the subscribers: the Central Offices (COs). A careful look into the CO reveals a capacity-latency predicament underlining the need for the employment of innovative technological solutions, with photonics emerging as the key enabling technology, that will establish a new NGCO ecosystem where component-level advancements can yield unparallel architectural benefits. OCTAPUS aims to deliver an agile, low-cost and energy-efficient PIC technology framework that will re-architect the NGCO ecosystem, transparently upgrading its capacity to 51.2Tb/s and beyond, through an innovative optically-switched backplane and transceiver toolkit. To realize its ambitious goals, OCTAPUS will leverage the novel integration of antimony-based Phase Change Materials (PCM) on the low-cost SiN to develop for the first time a non-volatile ns-scale optical switch technology for developing an ultra-high capacity optical backplane. OCTAPUS will also deploy a versatile portfolio of InP-based O-band optical components that will enable the realization of 50G low-power board-to-board and long-reach PON transceivers, securing 4x and 8x energy saving to existing state-of-the-art solutions, while reaching up to 37.5% cost improvement against conventional EML solutions, through its monolithic fabrication approach. Moreover, OCTAPUS will equip its novel PICs with low loss and compact interfaces to fibers, through advanced glass diplexer-embedded-interposers. Finally, OCTAPUS will synergize the developed optical components in a novel NGCO architecture, supporting 3 layers of traffic with deterministic latency guarantees for URLLC services, through the incorporation of reconfigurable express light paths along with TSN functionality.